It's a funny thing about intellectual property. People don't understand it, so they don't respect your rights if you own it.
People "get" that if they want to live in your house, they have to pay you rent for your property, in other words, they have to "license" the right to live there from you, the property owner.
But folks have a more difficult time getting their heads around the idea that intellectual property is also a type of property, and that intellectual property has an owner who can let you rent it, but only legally by license.
Or people can use your property dishonestly, by stealing it, or refusing to pay you to use it despite your right to control it. Like squatters who live in your property because you live in another state, for example.
ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC are like your rental agents. They rent your property out, and then collect your rent - your licenses - for the use of your property. That's all they do. There's nothing more to it than that.
I don't understand why it's so hard for people to grasp. It's so simple!
In the late 90s, the Restaurant and Hotel Owners Association hired hundreds of lobbyists to hurl epithets at the performance rights organizations, calling them "the music monopoly." I heard this phrase in testimony in the Michigan legislature when I went to the Senate to testify on behalf of music rights property owners.
Well, it's no more a monopoly than your own right to do what YOU want with YOUR house or other property. A copyright is a legal monopoly to control the use of
your property just as any other form of property ownership is.
The object of this effort was to weaken the right of copyright owners to effectively control their own property. The fact that the party of property, the Republican Party, took this lobby money and engaged in that effort is beyond my imagination, but that's exactly what they did. It blew my mind after supporting the Republicans for a long time in my life.
The joke is that these idiot lobbyists went to the State legislatures to make this effort, when in fact, copyright law is entirely within the Jurisdiction of the Federal courts and Federal law, and cannot be messed with by the States under the US Constitution. And this has been the case since Day One, 1787.
It is not buried in the Constitution, it is in Article 1, Section 8, which assigns to Congress the power to:
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors
the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
And it is a law that was put in place not by liberals, but by the very conservative Founding Fathers of our country who wished to control their own inventions and creations. Please respect it.